It was a battle between the Peugeot 208 T16 Pike Peak and a 1987 Jaguar XJR8/9
for top honours in the Goodwood Festival of Speed's timed shootout.

What with all of the 20th anniversary celebrations, the supercars, air displays, famous faces and baking hot weather, it is easy to forget that at the heart of this year’s Goodwood Festival of Speed is a good old-fashioned race. This is, after all, a hillclimb event, where the winner is the person to set the fastest time in a shootout up the 1.16-mile course.

So, come 4.25pm on Sunday the vehicles which had set the top 20 times over the weekend were invited back for one last crack of the whip - one last chance to see who could top the table.

With a qualifying run of 45.86sec, it looked as though Gregory Guilvert, French GT racer, in the ballistic, 875kg, 875bhp Peugeot 208 T16 Pikes Peak car had the top honours all sewn up. Had he won it, it would have been the car’s second victory in as many weeks, for this is the 208 in which rally champion Sébastien Loeb set a course record at the Pikes Peak hillclimb, by not just a second or two, but a minute and a half...

Driving quickly up hills is this Peugeot’s raison d’etre, and it looked as though it would only be a Rebellion Racing Lola-Toyota prototype driven by a certain Nick Heidfeld, the German Formula One driver who just so happens to hold the lap record up the Goodwood hill (with a time of 41.6sec in a McLaren F1 car in 1999), able to get close.